As you may have heard or even felt throughout the week with your sleep schedule, Daylight-Saving Time is here. Our bodies might have to get used to losing an hour for quite some time now as the US Senate passes permanent Daylight-Saving Time which will take effect beginning November 23.
According to wdel.com “Wilmington’s latest sunrise would be at 8:23 a.m. from roughly December 31 through January 9, and every sunrise would be after 8 a.m. from November 27 through February 10, a period of 75 days.
Correspondingly, those winter sunsets would be later, with the earliest sunset falling at 5:37 p.m. from December 2 through December 12, with sunsets before 6 p.m. running from November 1 through January 12.
If Delaware went the opposite way and enacted with permanent Eastern Standard time, it would make sunrises from June 10 through 18 take place at 4:33 a.m. while moving the latest sunset to just 7:34 p.m.”
Permanent Daylight Saving Time has happened in the 1970s. According to a Bloomberg article, “The U.S. experimented with permanent DST for about 16 months in the 1970s. President Richard Nixon signed the change into law in January 1974, shortly after the upheaval of the 1973 energy crisis, when gas prices soared. The change was dropped before the date for eliminating standard time was reached, after support for the switch fell in the face of dark winter mornings.”
Having permanent DST could cause some problems, especially for kids going to school in the mornings. DST means kids would catch the bus while it is dark. In the same Bloomberg article as stated previously, “A 6-year-old Alexandria girl was struck by a car on her way to Polk Elementary School on January 7; the accident broke her leg.
Two Prince George’s County students were hurt in February. In the weeks after the change, eight Florida kids were killed in traffic accidents. Florida’s governor, Reubin Askew, asked for Congress to repeal the measure. “It’s time to recognize that we may well have made a mistake,” US Senator Dick Clark of Iowa said during a speech in Congress on January 28, 1974. In the Washington area, some schools delayed their start times until the sun caught up with the clock.”
So there is some skepticism of doing a permanent DST. We just have to see in 2023 if it could work or like in the 1970s that it doesn’t workout and we go back to the way it currently is.
